I've had an ongoing neglected question on Expert's Exchange that I would love to finally have answered. Here's the link:
My Expert's Exchange question
My objective is to return a list of every Access file that the user has open at any one time. The site includes a complete set of code to retrieve all open Excel and Word files as an array of those application objects. I've tried everything I know to solve this problem and am poised to pay Microsoft Tech Support to help me answer this question, if no one on the forums is forthcoming with an answer.
The solutions you link for Excel and Word function by looking for instances of those programs running, and using their known COM interface to find the files they have open.
With Access, other things can open the files as well. For example, a C# program or SQL Server import wizard could also have the files open.
A general solution would be rather tricky. However, if you can be sure that the files have the usual extensions, you could enumerate all files that are open in the system and return a list of those that have an appropriate file extension.
To enumerate all open files in the system, see the EnumerateOpenedFiles() method in this article
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/shell/OpenedFileFinder.aspx?fid=422864&df=90&mpp=25&noise=3&sort=Position&view=Quick&fr=26&select=2277170
Note that you don't need all of the code there, as it presents a shell extension that calls EnumerateOpenedFiles() as part of it's operation. You only need that one method, modified to return only files matching the desired file extensions.
Related
For my project, I need to generate CAD drawing (almost a blueprint of a tank) through my VB.NET application. The app takes in some user input & based on this, it generates the geometry of the tank.
I am using Microsoft Visual Studio Professional 2012 & coding in the VB.NET language.
I have browsed through a lot of AutoCAD documentation but could not find exactly how & where are the modules hidden, for me to add them into my code.
I stumbled accross one particular document
which is where I found how to add the relevant files as reference to my VB solution. However, after adding some particular files I could then do Imports AutoCAD, but all the docs show that I must use Autodesk.AutoCAD. On inspection of the available modules/methods of the Imports AutoCAD I can see that it isn't complete as needed for the application development.
Can somebody please guide me as to how could I find or go about adding correct reference files to my VS solution to get full functionality from the AutoCAD modules? Thanks!
I posted this quite some time ago. It contains the information that you need
How to close a file in Autocad using C# keeping acad.exe running?
You can also download any of the AutoCAD .NET API's from here:
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?id=1911627&siteID=123112
Just in case someone else need the help.
Download the appropriate AutoCAD .NET API using the aforementioned link.
Put them in a location of your choosing.
general:
on the appropriate project in your visual studio's solution, right click -> Add Reference.
select Browse on left, click the browse button and go to the path where you saved the ObjectARX download.
Inprocess:
Navigate to the inc directory and
select the AcDbMgd.dll and AcMgd.dll then click add.
For these make sure to set the copy local property to false.
Interop:
Navigate to the appropriate directory: inc-win32 or inc-x64 depending on your processor.
select the Autodesk.AutoCAD.Interop.Common.dll and Autodesk.AutoCAD.Interop.dll then click add.
and unless you have an interest in the AutoCAD interface don't worry about the AcCui.dll
Hope this helps some one out :)
So, looking up more & more documentation led me to stumble across this
I found the dlls by simple file search for respective dlls metioned below in my local AutoCAD 2014 installation folder (C:\Program Files\Autodesk\AutoCAD 2014)
As per the documentation, following dlls are important ones -
AcCui.dll
acdbmgd.dll
acmgd.dll
Autodesk.AutoCAD.Interop.dll
Autodesk.AutoCAD.Interop.Common.dll
The credit for the last 2 dlls goes to Trae Moore.
How to add references to the dlls was mentioned in the documentation link.
I know i can use 7z or winrar but i want to learn this for myself.
How would i implement a self extracting archive? I can use C# or C++ but let me run down the problem.
When i open the exe i need some kind of GUI asking where to extract the files. Once the user says ok I should obviously extract them. I implemented a simple example in C# winforms already BUT my problem is HOW do i get the filenames and binary of the files into an exe?
One upon a time i ask Is it safe to add extra data to end of exe? and the answer suggested if i just add data to the end of the exe it may be picked up by a virus scanner. Now its pretty easy to write the length of the archive as the last 4bytes and just append the data to my generic exe and i do believe my process can read my own exe so this could work. But it feels hacky and i rather not have people accuse me of writing virus just because i am using this technique. Whats the proper way to implement this?
Note: I checked the self-extracting tag and many of the question is how to manipulate self extracting and not how to implement. Except this one which is asking something else Self-extracting self-checking executable
-edit- I made two self extracting with 7z and compared them. It looks like... well it IS the 7z.sfx file but with a regular 7z archive appended. So... there is nothing wrong with doing this? Is there a better way? I'm targeting windows and can use the C# compiler to help but i don't know how much extra work or how difficult it may be programmatically and maybe adding data to end of exe isnt bad?
It is possible. I used the following technique once, when we needed to distribute updates for the application, but the computers were configured so that the end user had no permissions to change application files. The update was supposed to log on to administrator account and update required files (so we came across identical problem: how to distribute many files as a single executable).
The solution were file resources in C#. All you need to do is:
Create a resource file in your C# project (file ending with .resx).
Add new resource of type "file". You can easily add existing files as byte[] resources.
In program you can simply extract resource as file:
System.IO.FileStream file = new System.IO.FileStream("C:\\PathToFile",
System.IO.FileMode.OpenOrCreate);
System.IO.BinaryWriter writer = new System.IO.BinaryWriter(file);
writer.Write(UpdateApplication.Data.DataValue, 0, UpdateApplication.Data.DataValue.Length);
(Here UpdateApplication.Data denotes binary resource).
Our solution lacked compression, but I believe this is easily achieved with libraries such as C#ZipLib.
I hope this solution is virus-scanner-safe, as this method creates complete, valid executable file.
I have some files which need reading using Access / VBA. They are compressed using ".gz" compression. How can I read those files in?
I figure this must be a solved problem but alas can't find anything. Command-line would be one option but it would involve the users of the VBA application having to have particular tools installed. Perhaps there is a library I can just include, which I can then ship with my VBA application (.accdr)?
There are quite a few libraries around, however, probably the most popular is zlib. A nice example using zlib, albeit written in VB6 (which shouldn't be too difficult to convert to VBA) is located here. One nice point about zlib is that it doesn't need registering (i.e. REGSVR*), so you should be able to drop it into the same folder as your DB (or even embed it into the DB then extract it automatically).
I need some advice on how to go about a particular issue I'm trying to build a work around for, but keep finding myself between a couple of poor options.. The application has a large collection of word doc templates. The application is to on the fly generate one of the templates and fill in the bookmarked values.
I have a few options on how to go about this...
Use the Interop Library: I pretty easily fill in an actual, templated document with the Interop library by going through and grabbing all the bookmarks and filling them in and saving the document again.
Issue: I need to be able to support version of Word from 2003-2010; version becomes a concern here... if I link against the wrong version of the Interop.Word, might it cause compatibility issues for users of older versions? I don't have much to test with here, so I'm not sure...
VBA Macro: I've actually used this method to build excel spreadsheets before; write fields to a csv, read into a new document generated from template via VBA, and ta-da, new document.
Issue: Security settings on end-user PCs are likely to be extremely strict. VBA likely to be disabled.
Is there a better way of going about this that I'm not seeing? Is the Interop version likely to be less of a big deal than I thought? Other than OfficeXML, which is a catastrophe for the documents we're using (I've looked..), is there another good possibility?
Edit: submitted early.. damn browser -_-;
VBA is usually blocked in documents and templates that are opened. But templates in the Word startup directory are allowed. I'm not sure about Word 2007 and 2010, but in Words 97 to 2003 there was a wrdstart directory that could contain templates that were loaded on startup of word. The normal.dot file was in there, and you could add your own to contain scripts, macros toolbars and other stuff.
I think this hasn't changed in essence since then, although I don't do a lot of Word development anymore, so I'm not sure.
[edit]
Yes, it still exists. In Word 2010 you'll find the setting in File -> Options -> Advanced -> File Locations (button). There is a 'Startup' setting, pointing to a directory. Templates in this folder will be loaded on startup and their macro's should be able to be executed.
Check File -> Options -> Trust Center -> Trust Center Settings (button). There, you can specify allowed documents, and trusted location. The wrdstart directory is in there, but you can add your own.
I'm going to have to write a number of vba modules for a project I'm working on, and would prefer to use SciTe to the built in editer in Office.
SciTe allows you to redirect the effect of hitting F1 to a arbitary command with the selected text as an argument. Is there anyway of using this functionality to search the relevant .chm files?
I'm guessing not, given that the help for vba is spread across multiple files, but I'm hoping someone can prove me wrong...
I'm especially interested if anyone can suggest a way to find out which chm file a particular libraries help resides, just from the fully delimitered name of the function.
Another approach is to use the HTML Help command line program HH.EXE to either show specific pages, or to decompile a particular CHM into HTML files.
Go to the folder mentioned by Lunatik in a command window and enter this command:
hh -decompile html vbaac10.chm
^^
# ac is for Access; use xl for Excel, wd for Word, etc
This will create an "html" folder below it and fill it with most of the files that went into creating the CHM file. The resulting HTML files can be opened directly in your browser, although they won't find their related style sheets or scripts which are addressed by their locations in CHM files. The style sheets and scripts do get extracted though so you can work with them too.
Also take a look at the XML files in the 1033 folder like VB_ACTOC.XML - this is the Table of Contents for the Access VBA help. It contains topic nodes with labels and urls for each item in the help file:
<topic>
<label>CheckBox Object</label>
<url>mk:#MSITStore:vbaac10.chm::/html/acobjCheckBox.htm</url>
</topic>
The mk:etc... url can be put on the HH command line to open that topic in a regular HTML Help window. Also, it shows the source CHM filename, and the relative path of the file when decompiled.
hh mk:#MSITStore:vbaac10.chm::/html/acobjCheckBox.htm
Working from these files, you could put together a script to find/grep files by keyword and show them in a browser, or you could reengineer the files into some sort of database or other lookup capability to work with SciTe's command based help system.
Some sites with more info about using HH.EXE:
HTMLHelp command-line
tips on using the HH command line and links to other sites
KeyHH 1.1
an alternate/supplemental program to HH.EXE for working with CHM files
The main files are held (for Office 2003 anyway) in Program Files\OFFICE11\1033, but accessing pages within them could be a bit tricky as Microsoft have gradually had to reign in the ability to delve into CHM files over the years due to security concerns.
This page (download) has some good info on what might still be possible as far as linking to specific pages inside a CHM
Having said that, I don't think this file is the default help shown to most users nowadays, but it's close enough, missing only the Office 2007 pimping most of the time. The online help seems to be set as default unless you specifically disable it during the Office install. The URLs are, I think, not very SEO friendly so couldn't be guessed. I suppose you could borrow a sneaky trick from scammers and craft URLs that point to the top link on Google, thusly: Range.
EDIT: Google cache link?
Inspired heavily by Lunatik's answer, adding:
command.help.$(file.patterns.vb)=http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&newwindow=1&q=site%3Amsdn.microsoft.com+%222003+VBA%22+$(CurrentWord)
command.help.subsystem.$(file.patterns.vb)=2
to my vb.properties file gives me a reasonable work around (loads a Google search results page with search criteria of:
site:msdn.microsoft.com "2003 VBA" $(CurrentWord)
Obviously no guarantees of it taking me to a helpful page, but then the inline help in the VBA editer isn't all that reliable on that one either...
Can anyone who knows SciTe better suggest a more elegant solution?